IntroductionSoil your undies or soil my undies is an international gimmick to show that soil is alive and demonstrate its vigor. A pair of brand-new 100% cotton underpants is left underground to the mercies of soil biota, then retrieved after exactly two months for public display Here’s one of many how-to descriptions. Procedures vary. The only standards seem to be 60 days underground and material all-cotton except for elastic waistband. It’s not clear to me whether the unmentionables used must be proper to females; several videos seem to show male briefs, which with the fly have more material. This report describes our first tests, in late summer 2018.

Methods Two pairs of new white cotton male’s underwear were buried in our perennial pasture north park in August 2018 (a) on Aug 15 Fruit of the Loom boy’s (all I could find at the mall in 100% cotton ) (b) on Aug 22 Calvin Klein men’s small size (32-34 “) Each pair was buried about 4 inches deep, laid flat with the sod replaced. No soil was put inside the cloth though this is done is at least one video. Both pairs were within 50 feet of where last year a soil sample had been submitted to a Comprehensive Analysis of Soil Health (CASH) at Cornell. On ten of the twelve dimensions that sample scored 93/100 or better. The overall score was 86 = OPTIMAL. It was dragged down from the high 90s by poor results for surface hardness and subsurface hardness, both state-dependent variables.

Rainfall Aug 9 – Oct 21 totaled 14.3 “ over 18 days (of 75) that saw precipitation. The one-day maximum was 2.5.“ The longest dry spell was Aug 19-Sept 4. Lambs grazed the pasture lightly until early October. The herbage later that month is shown in plate 5. Native grasses predominate with a good admix of white clover, some wild violet and a scattering of pinkweed. The most recent soil amendment had been to spread nine months earlier sheep barn floor waste that had been stockpiled outdoors in a single wide windrow uncovered for 4-8 months.

Results: the boy’s briefs were exhumed on Oct 15 after 60 days under the sod and gently washed. The image below shows a lot of cloth consumed compared to the never-buried identical pair in the next picture . The seat is gone, though the front panel is relatively intact.

on L front view, before, boy’s size

view from the back, after

The small adult pair was dug up on Oct 21 after 59 days underground, much the worse for its residence in the sod. Compare before below to after, following washing Six to eight earthworms were found in each site.

above: front view men’s small 32″ before

view from back of same pair after 59 days

The “undiesclosed location” of the experiment is pictured below on Oct 22 2018

Conclusions: In both specimens, a substantial portion of the cotton cloth originally buried had completely disintegrated by sixty days, due to activity of micro and macro-organisms in the soil.

Discussion: “Soil your undies” could become a metric about soil health. It needs validation. There are two prongs to this. One is to quantify how much material has been lost to soil organisms. Quantifying disappearance could be done by weighing before and after. That is not easy, because the exhumed remains have to be well-washed of dirt, yet vigorous washing without catching all loose fiber from the rinse water could exaggerate how much of the cotton has vanished. Moreover, any completely detached fragments have to be picked up, washed and weighed. An eyeball evaluation can only distinguish “nearly all gone” [ => really good soil] from “hardly touched” [ => poor soil].

The second prong is to compare the amount of material lost with traditional markers of soil health like organic matter content or respiration measured nearby at almost the same time. From the CASH study done in 2017 on soil from the “undiesclosed location,” we knew the soil was very good indeed. Those results are shown below.

Leaving out the dismal hardness results, the sample averaged 97/100 on the other ten. The hardness results last year may have been misleading; I may have used the penetrometer wrong and the soil may have been dryer than average. Soil with high moisture content has lower penetration resistance. This October the soil tested less hard on surface and subsurface than last, because perhaps we’d had a bit more rain. On Oct 19 soil hardness within 20 feet of the sites was 100-150 psi to 6” depth, while probing to 300 psi went down 16-18.” Rainfall Oct 9-19 had totaled 1.15 inches, nearly all on Oct 11. On Oct 27, after another 0.1 inch of rain hours earlier, the penetrometer consistently got to 6” by 100 psi, nearly always to 12-14” by 200 psi and to 16-18” by 250 psi. Especially in the top six inches these readings were much better than last year’s.

On the 2017 CASH, available water capacity was very high I suspect that penetrometer readings have to be controlled for moisture content of the near-surface soil. On all our pastures if it hasn’t rained for two weeks Graeme often has to use a hammer to pound in the spiked posts for flexnet fencing. The soil expert at Cornell told me that some silt loam soils, though great in other respects, can get very hard. SOM and forage testing in September 2018 in the larger pasture surrounding the “undisclosed location” again showed high SOM and high protein in the forage.

Given that the soil near the test sites is truly optimal and was probably softer this year than last, I was disappointed that the cotton cloth of the briefs had not been entirely consumed. At least one soil your undies web site claims that in really good soil nothing should be left but the elastic. I have seen one, but only one, photo that shows nothing else. Some possible explanations:

Time of year: in May to August the soil biota may be busier than in Aug-Oct .

Quality of cotton: organic is best but expensive and hard to find. We did not use organic.

Male’s or female’s. Men’s briefs have three layers of cotton, women’s, two

Qualities of soil not measured in CASH. Our soil is not “organic,” We don’t use synthetic nitrogen fertilizers or plant-o-cides but do use chemical wormers, which might hurt soil life .

This little experiment, in which soil your/my undies is compared to last year’s CASH, is inconclusive but appealing. CASH is quite costly. If procedures for soil your/my undies could be standardized (preferably using only women’s panties) and 60-day outcomes validated in some places by CASH, this semi-joke soil test could be actually useful. If CASH is used, the surface hardness results should be controlled somehow for soil moisture content. The test should not be done soon after lots of rain nor following a long drought. As to materials, underpants are be better than a handkerchief because the elastic makes the pair easier to find and hang up. A handkerchief might almost disappear A child’s white 100% cotton tee-shirt with a hemmed collar could work as well as underpants and would not be as gross to display afterwards.

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Abstract: A rising “carbon fee” would be un-affordable to many agriculturalists whose small businesses would get no dividend from “carbon fee and dividend (CFD)” as households would; so, most farmers and ranchers oppose CFD, though deeply concerned about the effects of weather volatility on farming today and in the future. Moreover, the decrease in carbon dioxide emissions from American agriculture expected from a rising carbon tax would be paltry compared to the drop expected in all other sectors of the economy, not worth the harm to farmers. Carbon sequestration and storage in soil (CSSS), however, would benefit agriculturalists and the whole population enormously more than simply reducing CO2 emissions from agriculture. The potential gains from CSSS in improved soil and atmosphere health should make it an integral part of the CCL exemplar for CFD. The best path to that, fair and sensible, would earmark some of the annual carbon fee revenues for direct payments to farmers and ranchers who actively sequester and store carbon.

The objective of Carbon Fee and Dividend (CFD) is to rapidly shrink the US carbon footprint, which for 2015 was about 6,703 M mt CO2-e/yr, 82% CO2 itself. (Graph 7.1) Most of the CO2 came from fossil fuel combustion (FFC).

Graph 7.1. Carbon footprint of USA ca. 2015 in million metric tons CO2-e/yr of three major GHGs, by gas: CO2 vs CH4 and N2O together. Data sources see earlier essay in this series

The blue carbon dioxide block in Graph 7.1 is the main target of a carbon tax or fee on coal, oil and gas collected “upstream.” The fee will have its biggest effect on CO2 emissions from FFC, with much less leverage on methane and nitrous oxide, the two other major greenhouse gases (GHGs).

A tax that causes a 50% decrease in FFC should bring (roughly) a 50% fall in CO2 emissions. Graph 7.2 shows how the US carbon footprint might look in two hypothetical future scenarios. With FFC down 50%, the three-GHG footprint is down 40%. With FFC down 80%, the footprint has shrunk by 2/3. If CO2 emissions went to zero (not shown), the overall footprint would be 82% smaller but could not shrink further, as the releases of CH4 and N2O are not governed by FFC. [Actually, they are, but less than CO2 emissions.]

Graph 7.2 The US carbon footprint in two hypothetical future scenarios of less fossil fuel combustion compared to current. Units and sources as for Graph 7.1

The overall carbon footprint of the country should shrink in step with falling FFC. The footprint of agriculture, however, will not show the same effect. Even though the Ag sector relies on FFC, the makeup of this sector’s carbon footprint is very different from that of the rest of the economy. Graph 7.3 (below) profiles the two sectors, Ag (677 M mt CO2-e/yr) and not-Ag (6026 M mt CO2-e/yr). For Ag, CO2 is only 23% of the sector total; for the rest of the economy, CO2 is 88%. A 50% cut in FFC for the Ag sector will reduce the three-GHG carbon footprint by just 78 M mt (-12%) while a 50% cut of FFC in all other sectors would bring down total emissions by 44% or 2,670 M mt CO2-e, a 34-fold absolute difference from Agriculture.

Graph 7.3 Carbon footprint by gas and sector, USA ca 2015

Agriculture must reduce FFC, no question. Putting the same carbon tax pressure on this sector as on all others, however, is inefficient and harmful. It delivers less gain in total GHG reductions for more pain to farmers and ranchers, who must incur new expenses to lower use of fossil fuels. Dividends from CFD to households that are not businesses will never begin to cover costs of responding to the carbon fee to which a farm household that is a business is exposed.

Fortunately, farming and ranching are uniquely positioned to make hay out of the country’s emergent need to radically cut emissions of CO2 and get it out of the atmosphere. Carbon sequestration and storage in soil (CSSS) removes carbon from the atmosphere. It also also improves soil’s fertility and resilience to weather volatility. With legumes planted, it can overcome the current dependence (some say addiction) to synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and biocides. By low-tech changes in management such as cover crops, no-till seeding and improved grazing of grasslands, agriculture could come close to being carbon neutral (i.e. 3-gas footprint near zero, net of emissions minus sequestrations). Only farmers and ranchers can do large-scale CSSS.

Does this sound too good to be true? The benefits of getting carbon back into soil and keeping it there are incontestable. There are of course questions about how much carbon can be sequestered and stored on US agricultural lands and on those of the whole world. Graph 7.4 uses a middle of the road estimate for a “maximal” rate of sequestration per acre to project how much carbon dioxide could be sequestered on the 2/3 of US agricultural acreage that is grassland/pasture/rangeland. (See p. 61 of this report by Garnett et al.) The highest rate shown (0.68 metric tons of CO2/acre applied by improved management to 840 million acres could sequester 571 M mt CO2/yr, about 84% of the 2015 agricultural 3-GHG footprint. Lower rates on fewer acres could sequester less, but half that rate on half those acres could sequester 143 M mt CO2/yr, more than the 121 M mt CO2/yr emitted from the whole Ag sector.

Graph 7.4 gives a conservative picture. It does not cover another 400 million acres of cropland that could also be used intensively for CSSS, at sequestration rates/acre higher than those averaged on properly-grazed grassland.

Graph 7.4 Potential for CO2 sequestration in M mt/yr by sequestration rate/acre and acreage managed with improved grazing on US grass and pasture lands

The potential for large scale carbon sequestration, though unproven, appeals strongly to ecologists and agriculturalists,. CSSS would not be a complete solution to global warming even if every acre of now or formerly agricultural land in the world could take in and store carbon at the highest rates in peer-reviewed literature. It is a wondrous strategy for the world’s ranchers and farmers to deploy in lowering GHG emissions and removing CO2 from the air. It is not a free lunch but it’s a bargain.

As I’ve explained in earlier essays, adopting even low-tech methods for switching from conventional to “regenerative” agriculture will for several years cost everyone who hasn’t already done it money and labor that many just don’t have. Distaste for being forced into an investment that one can’t afford makes many ranchers and farmers oppose CFD, dooming it legislatively. Citizens Climate Lobby is the the outstanding nonprofit organization that has proposed a CFD plan to legislators for their consideration. I and like-minded colleagues entreat CCL to revise the plan, allocating some revenues from CFD to directly help farmers and ranchers commit to CCCS.

An analogy from chemistry is apt. In graph 7.5 below, the orange line is the curve of the “activation energy” to get US farmers and ranchers rolling on CSSS. We believe the curve is too steep and too high to be surmounted if the only impetus to get over the top is the prod of the rising carbon fee on fossil fuels used by farmers and ranchers. The blue line represents a catalyzed reaction, where the catalyst is money from the carbon fee revenues. I think the choice is clear.

Graph 7.5 Schematic of activation energy curve for an un-catalyzed (orange line) reaction and the same reaction catalyzed (blue line).

Carbon Sequestration and Storage in Soil image courtesy of www.fibershed.com The sixth essay in a series on how American agriculture can thrive in a strenuous good-faith effort to halt global warming. The first five, earliest first, are these: 1. What-is-a-carbon-footprint 2. Comparing-carbon-footprints-of-world-and-american-agriculture 3. Fossil-fuels-in-the-carbon-footprint-of-american-agriculture 4. Carbon-tax-and-american-agriculture 5. Carbon foodprints [...]

photo “Corn Harvest” from pixabay,com This is the fifth essay in a series on how American agriculture can thrive in a strenuous good-faith effort to halt global warming. The first four, earliest first: 1. What-is-a-carbon-footprint 2. Comparing-carbon-footprints-of-world-and-american-agriculture 3. Fossil-fuels-in-the-carbon-footprint-of-american-ag 4. Carbon-tax-and-american-agriculture Abstract I [...]

The Keeling Curve: Atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory, annual peak and trough by year 1960 to now Source Scripps Institute This is the fourth of a series of essays about American agriculture and climate change. The first three, in order of appearance are these: 1. what-is-a-carbon-footprint 2. comparing-carbon-footprints-of-world-and-american-agriculture 3. Fossil [...]

photo from Free Farm Images The third essay in a series on how American agriculture can thrive in a strenuous good-faith effort to halt global warming. The six, earliest first, are these: 1. What-is-a-carbon-footprint 2. Comparing-carbon-footprints-of-world-and-american-agriculture 3. Fossil-fuels-in-the-carbon-footprint-of-american-agriculture 4. Carbon-tax-and-american-agriculture 5. Carbon foodprints in American Agriculture 6. Carbon sequestration and [...]

June grazing: photo by Stephen Shafer Abstract In the world, and in the USA, crop and livestock agriculture accounts for about 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions. In both spheres, fossil fuel combustion (FFC) is usually tagged with only 9-12% of agricultural GHG releases. Ag-related sources not [...]

Part 1. What is a “carbon footprint” and how do we use it? First in the series, directly below Part 2. Comparing the carbon footprints of world and American agriculture. Part 3. Fossil Fuels in the Carbon Footprint of American Agriculture Part 4. Carbon Tax Part 5. Carbon foodprints in American agriculture [...]

Sue Stewart died March 13, 2016 after a long illness. Sue was a good friend to us, to children, and to all animals in her care, as well as being a devoted wife to Graeme. We remember her joy in taking care of animals, whether working at Rhinebeck Animal Hospital, as [...]

Lambing 2014 as of 4/20/14 . First live birth Feb 1. last March 21. More lambs born here (105) than ever before. 57 ewes put to rams last fall. Three sold at NYS Bred Ewe and Ewe Lamb Sale in October, of which two had twins and one triplets. Of [...]